Those of you who have been with me and this blog for a while might remember the post I did nine years ago when I put my then-new Graslon on-flash modifiers to the test while photographing a rehearsals for one of the Garfield Shakespeare Company productions in Indianapolis.
While I was mostly pleased with how the Graslon performed, I made a point to mention my biggest grievance, which was that the modifier did not stay attached to the flash as it was supposedly supposed to.
The Graslon company had someone monitoring the Internet at the time to detect references to the modifers in news articles, blog posts and the like. They saw my post and responded to my beef about the lack of secure fitting of the modifier. They offered suggestions, which I promised to try -- and I did. To no avail. I found that the attachment continued to not be securely afixed no matter what I tried. I stopped using it.
Then a few years later -- it's probably been five or six years now -- I came across another modifier that promised the same light-diffusing benefits as the Graslon but with much better flash attachment security, so I tried it on a money-back guarantee.
I fell in love with the MagMod MagSphere on-flash modifier immediately, and I have not had a lick of trouble with it from the get-go. The sphere attaches to the top of the flash unit with a magnet drawn to an open-ended grip, or sleeve, that you first slip over the flash head. (The magnet is the "mag" part of MagMod). I simply leave the grip on the flash at all times; the silicone sphere, the actual modifier, is easily removable from the magnetic grip after use to pack away.
The MagMod sphere nicely distributes the light from the flash when I use it, filling in dark spaces nicely and not over lighting faces. It also does not produce red-eye.
I used the MagMod last week for the first time in probably two years when I took a multi-generation picture of Lee Ann's family who had gathered at her daughter's home for an early Thanksgiving dinner while we were there.
I hadn't used the MagMod a whole lot in recent years. largely because the volume of my photography in general dropped considerably as a result of the COVID lockdown and aftermath. So turning to it for the family pictures required a brief reacquaintance, but not so much with the modifier which is a snap to get on. The real reacquaintance was with my flash unit, a Canon 580 EX. I put it on TTL and manually set the flash zoom to about 55mm (I was using a Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L lens on my Canon 6D).
I used the manual shooting mode, setting my ISO to 400, my shutter to 1/160 and my aperture to f/8 because we had three rows of people, which I felt necessitated a safe depth of field to get everyone in the picture in focus and sharp. The images require minimum adjustment in Photoshop Elements afterward.
These were not formal portraits -- we just got the people together and tried to shoot quickly, mostly because of the youngster in the front row who was not an easy one to persuade to sit still or coach how to pose and smile.
Afterward, the girlfriend of one of Lee Ann's grandsons asked us to take the shot of the two of them with her dog (below). Again, we weren't striving for perfection in the pose here, but I did spend some time in Photoshop healing some issues I came across on each of the couple's faces. Hopefully you won't detect any major problems there. I took this photo in vertical orientation, and the MagMod had no trouble following the flash when I cranked it upward from a position perpendicular to the camera.
I will mention that Lee Ann and I both tried to talk the couple into using a solid-color background, which was actually very handy and nearby. But they wanted the black-and-white wall hanging showing the urban community as their background. I elected not to argue. The photo below was the only one I shot; they were pleased with it.
To be clear, I present these not to be a study (and certainly not a lesson) on portraiture. Indeed, in retrospect, I do wish we'd taken more time to better pose the ladies on the ends of the middle row of the group photo, for example.
I present these to show you how the MagMod Sphere performed in very little time or preparation. The importance of the photo was to include Lee Ann's 99-year-old uncle and 97-year-old aunt (seated in front on either side of Lee Ann's youngest grandson in photo leading off the post) in a picture of some kind with extended family. The group includes Lee Ann's mother, sister, oldest daughter, three grandsons and son-in-law. So in the sense that we got everyone in one photo in a rare confluence of family, we considered it a success.
